Present your web design
I experience a lot that people that are asking communities to judge their web design. Asking communities is a good way to learn, because you can get a lot of opinions from a lot of people with different taste. What most people forget is that they also ask people to spend their time on judging something, time they could use on something else. And because people want to get judged, they also want to get it fast and get annoyed if they don't get a nice result or any result at all.
I wrote this guide to help people getting a better result from their question, and get a better chance of getting a response.
Formulate what you want to be judged.
- Is it a design at an early state?
- Is it a final design?
- Is there something you know you have to improve but haven't had time to do yet?
Let us know, it saves our time and save your time, at the same time you don't have to sit and get annoyed about people telling you about problems you already are aware off.
Give us a bit of idea of what your thoughts are with the site. What feelings you were trying to inject to people with the design:
- Professional design.
- Fun design.
- Personal design.
- Reliability.
- Trust.
- Relaxation.
The list goes on, but if you present a design that should look professional, and it looks like a hobby site. The site might look good, but it didn't hit the target. And it helps people figuring out what to comment.
Please please don't present that is out of date. The web designs that looked good 5 years ago is not following up. I know it might sound harsh but we are evolved to Web 2.0, meaning that the design have to follow. It is not trust worthy to have a basic frame design in a holygrale setup, because it looked like something that wasn't made with creativity.
I'm not saying that holygrale don't work because it does. But be creative with it. Make it look nice in both design and functionality. Basicly just make sure that the design is following present days designs.
Know what you are doing. If you want to do web design, learn web design. Don't sit in front page and mix something together and present it for people to judge, learn CSS, make the site correct. If you ask me it is the first thing I check. “Is the page valid?” If it isn't valid and not made correct, I'm going to comment that and nothing more before it is corrected. Which means that by checking if the page checks out before you post it you would get my opinion right away instead of wasting both our time on something that could been left out.
Presenting a web design that isn't valid gives a feeling in me that you didn't care enough to do anything about presenting the web design. Why should I care about it then? The more you prepare in advance the more I feel like that you are interested in getting feedback. The more I'm interested in giving good feedback, and putting energy in to the assignment. Remember in most communities the help is free, so you have to give something for us to help you. And if not money give us a well prepared presentation. That's the least you could do.
Feel free to critique this article on: mail [at] magic-mouse.dk
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